Thursday, February 26, 2009

Ramelli and Konstan on Wolfe on Ilaria Ramelli, David Konstan, Terms for Eternity: aiônios and aïdios in Classical and Christian Texts. Response to BMCR 2009.02.16.
Ilaria L.E. Ramelli (Catholic University of Milan, Italy; ilaria.ramelli@virgilio.it) and David Konstan (Brown University, Providence; david_konstan@brown.edu)

We are grateful for the reviewer's appreciation of our work. However, since the review was so brief and somewhat perfunctory, it inevitably omitted mention of many of the themes and conclusions that we reached in our book, Terms for Eternity, and so, to help orient the reader of BMCR to its contents, we thought of providing the following summary and observations.

Although the review states that "it has been widely noted" that only life and beatitude is called aïdios in the Bible, but not death, punishment, and fire, this has, in fact, never been previously pointed out and demonstrated. Equally important, this same distinction holds for many Christian authors, as we show in detail.

While it is true that our conclusion is brief, we provide individual conclusions and comments not only in the general conclusion to the book but also at the end of each section and author; the reader will, we trust, find these useful. At the same time, it obviated the need to repeat these critical remarks at the end of the book.

The organization of the material is far from being simply chronological; in our systematic investigation we treat each of the philosophical schools in turn, pointing out, for example, the exceptional use of the terms for eternity in the Platonic tradition, and in the Bible (LXX and comparison with Hebrew background, plus the Greek New Testament), and then the reception of both biblical and philosophical language and concepts in Philo and the Patristic authors -- most of whom, as we point out, maintain the terminological distinction found in the Bible, and most rigorously those who supported the doctrine of apokatastasis. We could hardly have done otherwise, beginning with Patristic philosophers without investigating their main sources of inspiration, namely the Bible and the Greek philosophers, who in turn display very different uses of aïdios and aiônios according to their schools.

Among the points that may interest readers of BMCR, we note that aiônios is never used by Aristotle, but aïdios over 300 times: he was clearly rejecting the thesis of an atemporal eternity, for which his teacher, Plato, had invented the new term (we show that all attributions of aiônios to presocratic philosophers are late and probably not original); what is more, Simplicius and other commentators on Aristotle never use aiônios either. The Stoics use aiônios only in reference to the repeated aiônes, never for time, space, or other infinite quantities, and the Epicureans use only aïdios for matter and void, the only things that they regarded as eternal. As for the Old and New Testaments, aïdios appears only twice in each, in contrast to hundreds of uses of aiônios. This is a remarkable distribution, and we explained why it might be so. We also illustrate how all this forms the linguistic background to the Fathers.

We did not make this study into an argument concerning universal salvation, as the reviewer would have liked, for a reason that we indicate in the introduction and the conclusion, for we wished to concentrate on the linguistic evidence independently of doctrinal evidence (though of course we show where the linguistic evidence supports certain doctrinal conclusions). To do otherwise might have convicted us of circular reasoning. One of us (Ilaria Ramelli) is now preparing a fullscale study on apokatastasis, in which the thesis of the destruction of the wicked is also examined, along with the reasons that led Origen and his followers to reject it; but to do so in the present monograph would have rendered it tendentious, whereas we wished rather to provide a basis for many kinds of scholarly research.

We hope that these supplementary remarks will be helpful to the reader, even as we express our gratitude once again for the reviewer's kind assessment of our work. We very much hope that our research will prove useful to scholars in ancient philosophy, Patristics, ancient Greek, and classical and Christian thought generally.

The volume under review contains the proceedings of the eighth Conference on Vulgar/Late Latin. The series started in 1985 and the proceedings, in the course of time, have considerably grown in size. The present volume collects 68 of the 89 original papers delivered at the conference, and reaches over 600 pages although printed in hideously small print. The pieces are organized in chronological order of topics, and cover a period from early Latin and Italic to Dante and 15th-century metalinguistic uses of the word "Latin". The quality of the papers is uneven, from very expert and illuminating to perplexing or irrelevant, but the majority make the book definitely worth having. In the following paragraphs, I give brief presentations of what I thought were the most striking contributions, or at least those from which I learned most. Exclusion from this sample does not reflect necessarily on a given contribution's individual worth.

For clarity's sake, I have attempted to discuss the book's contents by object of study and areas of methodology, rather than follow the chronological succession of the pieces as in the volume. The three areas which I think help us best to envisage the volume's most interesting features are 1) lexical novelties, typically extracted from inscriptions, but also from unfamiliar texts and documents from Late Antiquity or the Early Middle Ages, or reconstructed from a comparative perspective; 2) new approaches to grammatical, typological, pragmatic topics relating to Latin with the help of modern synchronic linguistics; 3) 'vertical communication', i.e. studies devoted to the issue of the intelligibility of Latin to illiterate or barely literate audiences.

In what I call group 1, the single most outstanding paper is Solin's ("Vulgar Latin and Pompeii", 60), a preview of the forthcoming supplement to CIL IV, the Pompeii and Herculaneum inscriptions, on which Solin and others have been working for several years. Solin discusses several graffiti, correcting previous editors' readings on the basis of his own inspection in situ. Here the contents are naughty, the scholarship impeccable. I shall simply attach some marginal notes on details. The syncopated perf. ending -aut in CIL IV 1391 exmuccaut '(she) dried (me) clean of mucus/snot' (i.e. semen), has several parallels in Väänänen's Le latin vulgaire des inscriptions pompéiennes, p. 45; several more can be found in city of Rome's inscriptions: cf. my review of CIL 6.6.3 in CR 58.2 (2008), 532. On CIL IV 2178a NICA CRETEISSIANE Solin suggests NICA C(H)RE(S)TE ISSIME "long may you live, Chrestus, yourself'. If the new reading is correct, the superlative issime from ipse, with the phonetic 'popular' spelling -ss-, is a very important acquisition, and means not 'yourself' but 'master'. Solin's reading thus gives support to a rare form of respectful address which we knew only from Petronius up to now (ipsimus= dominus, but not in address: cf. 69.3 solebam ipsumam meam debattuere 'I was wont to batter my mistress'). For isse, issa as honorifics in Pompeian inscriptions cf. CIL IV 8364 SECVNDVS | PRIME SVAE VBI|QVE ISSE SALVTE, CIL IV 8954, HABITVS ISSAE SALVTEM. On CIL IV 4874, VITALIO BALIAT CAR EST MUSICUS 'long life to Vitalio, because he is a musician', one might consider punctuating 'why? (because) he is a musician', although Väänänen had indeed included a similar case of a possible causal QVARE, op. cit. p. 126. For the treatment in Pompeian inscriptions of word initial qu- cf. e. g. como = quomodo in CIL IV 9251.

Several other valuable papers deal with items of the lexicon in the lower registers of Latin. One of these is Cam ("Nomenclature des realia de la vie rurale: étude du vocabulaire des installations et des équipements de l'écurie dans les textes latins de médecine vétérinaire", 281), on hippiatrics and horsekeeping generally, in which a great deal of technical vocabulary is aptly discussed and convincingly interpreted, starting from a chapter in Vegetius' Digesta artis mulomedicinalis. I found of particular interest Cam's discussion of the 'vulgar' word for 'stable, fold' in Veg. Mul. 1.56, zaca (cratis, quae et zaca uocatur a uulgo), against the concurrent readings/ conjectures iacca (also in TLL) or occa. Cam supports zaca on the basis of a Greek passage in Theophanes, Chronographia, PG 108, 533c, so far ignored by scholars in this connection, where the hapax ζάκα (accusative) occurs with the same meaning. In addition to this and other significant linguistic acquisitions (I mention only the interpretation of the Lt. neologism pontile 'wooden stable floor' and the Greek loan-word bruncarius 'muzzle'), the paper is useful also for its discussion of various Realien of horsekeeping in antiquity, with clarifying, and much needed, drawings.

Béla Adamik ("Remarks on the Changes of Consonantism in Pannonian Latinity as Evidenced by the Inscriptions", 103) shows that consonant change in Pannonian Latin was in step with contemporary trends in other Latin-speaking areas until the perhaps modest-sized Romanized population was either swallowed or forced to move out by mass migrations from East. In this context, the paper is also notable for some persuasive interpretations of substandard inscriptions, and particularly of the names TEOTIGINOS < THEOTECNOS, and IODOROS < DIODOROS, exhibiting respectively yodisation of 'e' in hiatus and the reduction of [dy]+ vowel> [y]+ vowel.

A strong point of the Conference, traditionally, is the search for evidence of spoken Latin at the transitional period from the comparative evidence of the Romance languages in their earliest documented stages. A strong paper is offered by E. Nieto Ballestrer ("Sustantivos latino-romances derivados en -toriu y en -toria en la toponimia de Huesca", 261), whose research concentrates on the linguistically conservative area of Northern Aragon, so immune from common linguistic evolution that even voicing of intervocalic Latin occlusives has not occurred in the local dialect. The local toponomastic allows to recapture items of Latin -orium derivatives which must have been current in the spoken Latin of the area. Similarly impressive is J. Trumper on "Latino Sommerso", Substrate, and the Composite Nature of Late Latin" (301), devoted to fish names in Polemius Silvius, the author of the Laterculus, a kind of Latin Concise in the form of lists of names arranged by thematic areas (edition by Mommsen in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Chronica minora saec. IV.V.Vi.VII (Berlin, 1892), p. 544 (nomina natancium); more recently, Polemius has been discussed in some detail by J. N. Adams, The Regional Diversification of Latin (Cambridge, 2007), 295-9, as a source of Gallic regionalisms. Trumper, an expert in Italian dialectology of the Veneto area, tries to identify fish species in the list, against the background of the rapidly changing fish vocabulary of Late Latin, as a result of language contact. The conclusion to which Trumper reaches is that in the fifth century little Germanic influence is noticeable in the fish names of Polemius' list. M. Loporcaro, in a formidably dense, closely argued paper challenging the belief in open-syllable tendency in Late Latin ("La tendenza alla sillaba chiusa in latino tardo", 336) seeks and finds confirmation from Italian dialectology for the hypothesis that in Late Latin muta cum liquida was heterosyllabic, i.e. made position, at least as a diatopic and diastratic variant, against the Classical Latin norm. M. Lörinczi ("Ideologia linguistica e fondamenti di storia della lingua sarda", 548) makes a persuasive case against M. L. Wagner's view that the treatment of inherited voiceless labiovelars in Campidanese Sardinian was b rather than qu (i.e. Campidanese abba for Lt. aqua). R. Sornicola ("Nominal Inflection and Grammatical Relations in Tenth-Century Legal Documents from the South of Italy (Codex Diplomaticus Amalfitanus)", 510), highlights the tension between the written and the spoken register in the Codice diplomatico amalfitano, a collection of notarial Latin charters and documents going back to the tenth century. These documents, Sornicola claims persuasively, continue lexical and phraseological usages of the ancient Roman legal tradition, and often reflect 'vulgar' usage of very long standing.

In group 2, and one of the best papers, though neither on Vulgar nor on Late Latin is R. Ashdowne's on the 'pragmaticalization' of Latin oaths ("E-vocative Invocation: on the historical morphosyntax of Latin "Oaths"", 13). Ashdowne looks at the gradual weakening of oath phrases from performatives ('I swear to Jupiter this to be true') to asseverative formulas, indicating non-neutral speaker attitude to what is being said ('help me god/heavens! what a naughty thing have I done today!'). The author persuasively interprets the pragmatic function of many (pseudo)-vocative and interjectional formulas in Roman comedy and Cicero (such as hercle, edepol, per deos) -- a topic long overdue for study with up-to-date methodology. However, I am not sure that the author is right to explain the origin of phrases such as (1) per te... obsecro / deos immortalis or (2) per deos atque homines ego te obtestor "I beseech you in the name of god (and man)" from the basic oath form as he takes it to be, e. g. (3) per Iouem iuro (med esse) (Pl. Amph. 435) 'I swear by Jove that (I am that person)'. (1) and (2) are, I think, requests based on the belief that the gods mete out just retribution to the good and the compassionate, i.e. 'before the gods' is used because of the belief that they will remember a good deed. In other words, what proves that (2) is a weakening of the (3) oath form, rather than an independently evolved request?

Another paper in which a general linguistics approach offers important insights is Fruyt and Orlandini on the evolution of the Latin verb ("Some Cases of Linguistic Evolution and Grammaticalisation in the Latin Verb", 230), focussing mainly on grammaticalization and neutralization processes. They start from imperative periphrases such as i et, noli, caue and fac followed by either the infinitive or the subjunctive. I agree with their conclusion that fac is grammaticalized as a polite variation for the imperative, as can be seen clearly from polite phrases in Apul. Met. 1.23 fac libenter deuerseris in nostro 'make yourself at home in our lodgings' and Tab. Vindol. 2.291 iii Idus Septembr[e]s soror ad diem sollemnem natalem meum rogo libenter facias ut uenias ad nos 'on the third before the Ides of Sept., my sister, I have the pleasure to ask you to come to our birthday celebration'. Their next point is a discussion of coepi as a verb focalizer, gradually losing its lexical meaning of 'beginning to' (though the dividing line between the lexical and the focalizing meaning is somewhat obscure to me). Moving on to the quasi-auxiliary usage of habeo with the infinitive, Fruyt/Orlandini discuss instances in Tertullian which seem to pave the way for the Romance conditional, esp. the 'future in the past' function of the conditional, as in habebat reuelari 'was to be revealed' or prouenire habebat "had to happen". (The same topic is discussed from a different angle in another good paper, V. Bourova, "Les participes futurs en -urus / -ndus combinés avec un temps passé de esse en latin tardif. Un conditionnel non abouti?", 271, on the Latin 'failed' constructions for the later conditional). Fruyt/Orlandini then discuss neutralization of perfect participle forms, and weak causativity with iubeo and facio. They argue that iubeo has weak semantic content in stereotyped polite formulas such as iubeo te bene ualere, but I doubt if it is necessary to go back to a supposed pre-literary inherited meaning 'to encourage': in politeness contexts, iubeo is used to reassure the addressee of the speaker's interest in his/her well-being and the mock-assertiveness is part of the politeness 'scenario' of conversation. Facio too can be used with weak semantic content, as an all-purpose expression, typically in the lower, colloquial registers, as one can see from the following parallels: Vetus Latina, Ev. Ioh. 6.21 facta est nauis ad terram 'the ship came near the shore', Sch. Cic. Gron. p. 436.20 Orelli dicimus: fac ad manum illum codicem 'we say, pass that book'. Indeed, commenting on Ter. Ad. 916 quid cessas ire ac facere?, Donatus qualifies the use of facere as ἰδιωτικῶς, that is, probably, 'colloquial'.

Natalya Stolova ("From Satellite-Framed Latin to Verb-Framed Romance: Late Latin as an intermediate stage", 253) studies the transition from Latin to Romance in a typological perspective, focussing on verbs expressing directionality and movement. Romance languages, she argues, have lost most Latin prefixed movement verbs, such as abscedere, abire, deuenire, with few (she lists five) exceptions. She reads the change in the context of Leonard Talmy's typological theory and she finally argues that the cause of the change was an attempt to foreground, in terms of cognitive salience, the path/movement element, as can be seen in the loss of Latin ascendere to Late Latin (in fact only a reconstruction) *MONTARE, It. montare, Fr. monter, in which the mons element is immediately recognizable.

As in previous volumes of the series, 'vertical communication' (my group 3) has produced some important papers. Among these, I single out Biville, who presents a little known grammatical treatise by Cassiodorus on orthography ("Normes "orthographiques" et oralité dans la latinité tardive: le latin du De Orthographia de Cassiodore", 381) and Van Acker ("Dans les méandres de la communication verticale mérovingienne: connaissances passives et perte d'informations", 463). The problem of 'vertical communication' in Cassiodorus' work is in evidence from the start, where in a sort of metaliterary preface the author has his Vivarium brethren interrupt his scriptural exegesis with the outcry: "what's the use of learning all that the Ancients have done, and all the knowledge Your wisdom has taken the trouble to collect for us, if we cannot write it, nor repeat correctly what we don't understand in writing?" -- an excerpt from which it is easy to grasp the rich interest of the following piece. The treatise is also original in contrasting 'modern' and 'ancient' Latin usage, and in assigning precedence, at least for the practical purposes of teaching the monks, to the former. Van Acker attempts to outline the passive Latin competence of Merovingian church-goers listening to the simple, but fully Latinate Passio Memorii (edited by B. Krusch in MGH, SRM 3, 101-4, Vita Memorii presbyteri et martyris), as well as the varying degrees of difficulty presented by different excerpts (in terms of lexicon, sentence length, structure etc.), against the background of the supposed 'spoken language' of the time. My only query is about the clearly high-register dramatic phrase in paragraph 5, ad ille sacer unda sanguinis suis perfusus est ('And that holy man was drenched by his own overflowing blood"), where suis, sic in the MS, is not the genitive. It may be true that a general idea was conveyed by the formularity of the phrase, and by the survival of some left-branching in old French, but was the pseudo-genitive suis, [suwes], really what the old preacher read out?

Augustine is of course best known for his major works, such as the Confessions and the City of God, and there is no shortage of recent studies on these books. Matters are somewhat different concerning some of Augustine's minor works, many of which still wait for helpful and accessible tools for students.

An example of such a text is De magistro (On the master), a philosophical dialogue dating from around 390 AD. In this intriguing text, Augustine explores the essence of teaching, mostly by discussing the nature of language (the basic means of communication between teacher and pupil), and of 'signs' in general. It is argued, among other things, that words taken by themselves cannot teach anything, and that the truth in the meaning of words is living within people. Augustine would not be Augustine if this truth were not identified with Christ. In the end, the inner truth that is Christ appears to be essential for good teaching.

Although Christian religion is the framework for all of Augustine's writings, De magistro is predominantly philosophical and is mainly concerned with words and language, which makes it a relevant text for students and scholars with interest in linguistics.

Secondly, the text is remarkable as a dialogue between Augustine himself and his young son Adeodatus. It has often even been considered a verbatim transcription of a real conversation, which took place between late 397 and middle 389, when Adeodatus was about sixteen years of age.1

The newly published study by Emmanuel Bermon is a reworked 'dossier d'habilitation' presented at the University Michel de Montaigne - Bordeaux in 2005. After a 50-page introduction, it offers readers a Latin text with facing French translation; the text has been reproduced from the edition by K.D. Daur in the Corpus Christianorum (Series Latina vol 29, Turnhout 1970). The rest of the book, some 500 pages, is taken up with the commentary. It takes the rather unusual form of a running text discussing the text paragraph to paragraph, but without lemmas.

Thus, the commentary is clearly not intended for readers looking for grammatical help, cultural information or rhetorical and literary analysis. Berton rather focuses on the philosophical dimensions of the work. He analyses and discusses the text both within the context of ancient approaches of language (such as ancient grammar or Stoic semantics), and from a modern perspective, using Wittgenstein's Recherches philosophiques as a model. The De magistro, while being called 'chef-d'oeuvre de l' antiquité sur le langage' (p.547), inevitably shows some marked differences from a modern approach such as Wittgenstein's. An ample bibliography and indices conclude the volume. It will be most relevant for personal and institutional libraries of ancient philosophy.

Notes:

1. The biographical information about Adeodatus is entirely to be drawn from Augustine's works and it is regrettably scarce indeed. The De magistro may be said to be the source in which Adeodatus figures most prominently. Except for a longer monologue by Augustine (c. 33-46, likely to be part of a subsequent revision of the text) he remains an active partner in the dialogue until the end. The boy seems sharp-witted, gentle, and eager to learn, a son of whom Augustine is noticeably proud. Possibly, Augustine wrote and published the work as a tribute to Adeodatus, who died young at an unspecified date. Bermon gives the essential data about Adeodatus in his introduction, but in the commentary, he is not concerned with his biography.

Those who will read this interesting but somewhat puzzling book might well wonder to what extent its title1 tallies with its contents, mainly a paraphrasis of Thucydides' book eight, which includes a number of discussions not only or even mainly pertaining to the part played by individuals in history. The general introduction (p. 1-18), an abridged version of a 2003 paper ("Geschichte und Kontingenz. Einleitende Überlegungen für eine Thukydideslektüre"), first discusses, so to speak sub specie aeternitatis, the nature of history as what happens, the factors and actors which make history, the part played in it by contingency, and the nature, aim and utility of history as the writing of what happens. This introduction, which may be called philosophical or epistemological, seems to me to be a clear and clever piece of empirical or analytical thinking, but it raises some issues : one may miss more awareness of the various meanings of the word history and of the relativity and historical dependency of any conception of history both as the framework within which an individual or a group lives and as its transformation into writing. A subsequent section of the book shortly sets the birth of history in the context of Greek culture and thought. It is not original but prudent and says nothing which can arouse controversy. However it raises an issue concerning the whole book : for whom is it meant ? The foreword mentions the "nachdenkliche Leser".

The bulk of the book is a paraphrasis of book eight interspersed not only with translations from the Greek (fortunately produced in italics but unfortunately not always fully indicating the divisions of the text first introduced by E. Fr. Poppo and generally observed after him), but also with Heitsch's short remarks and longer discussions. The explanatory paraphrasis is divided into three parts (8.1-28 : the events of autumn 413 till autumn 412 ; 8.29-60 : the events of winter 412/411 and 8.61-109 : the events of summer 411), each of which is followed by a useful "Rückblick" which however does not avoid mere repetition of elements contained in the preceding analysis. Heitsch's observations are mixed with straightforward paraphrasis in such a way that one must read Thucydides if one wants to be sure what belongs to whom. This may not be misleading for hardcore specialists of Thucydides, who may anyway need no such paraphrasis, but it may prove so for those readers whom Heitsch addresses with information such as the following : "Agathon, (den der Leser vielleicht aus Platons Symposion kennt)" (p. 114), "Sestos (an der Westküste des Hellesponts)" (p. 157). Heitsch seems to justify his explanatory paraphrasis thus (p. 17-18) :

I cannot help thinking "Deskriptive Analyse" is somewhat euphemistic. That must not make one blind to the merits of what is not mere paraphrasis but elucidation of what (no small amount !) is implicit and unclear in Thucydides' text. Scholars will be especially grateful to Heitsch for the longer discussions embedded in the paraphrasis, but they may well regret that this embedding prevented the author from thoroughly discussing the issues and exposing and refuting contrary views. The generally light footnotes are neither uninteresting nor unimportant but they are no compensation. The use of secondary literature is limited, and readers who are neither hardcore specialists nor uninterested in these matters will too rarely be spared the effort to check if Heitsch is exposing an original view or one that has already been stated (compare p. 93, on the tautology of 8.58.2, with Andrewes 1981, p. 1402 and see below on the second and third Spartan-Persian treaties). Though one may not be fully happy with Heitsch's use of the paraphrasis, this reviewer, after reading Thucydides' Greek, was somewhat relieved to read Heitsch's almost always clearer German. But it must be acknowledged that only the original text can provide the intellectual enjoyment and excitement that is traditionally associated with Thucydides at his best. Thus Heitsch's analysis of 8.65-66, which focuses on the missing information in Thucydides' report, does not make it look like what Andrewes 1981 (p. 164) thinks it is, "one of Thucydides' most powerful pieces of political description".

Heitsch provides stimulating views or discussions which may be useful even if they are sometimes problematic : thus (p. 58 n. 55) on the Daric stater (surprisingly little money, as is acknowledged) Tissaphernes gives for each prisoner of Iasos (8.28.4). Heitsch rebukes the view that Thucydides intends his (Greek) readers to understand that Tissaphernes dupes the Spartans. In that case, he argues, Thucydides would have indicated the amount in Greek currency (twenty silver Attic drachmai). The objection seems to me to be futile, because Thucydides probably expected his readers to know the worth of the στατὴρ Δαρεικός, abridged Δαρεικός, a phrase and word well enough attested in Greek literature and inscriptions (Hultsch, Metrologie, p. 485 ; Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, IV.1, p. 75 n. 2 ; see also M. Alram, Encyclopaedia Iranica online, s. v. Daric, with more recent bibliography). Heitsch's second objection is better : the low price results from "an arrangement with Tisaphernes about the booty, out of which the Spartans had in other respects done very well" (Andrewes 1981, p. 69).

He further argues (p. 63-64) that, since we cannot think Thucydides was unaware that the second Spartan-Persian treaty (8.37) was less advantageous to the Spartans than the first (18), something must be wrong with 8.36-37 as they stand, for the second treaty (8.37) is, Heitsch argues, supposed by Thucydides (8.36.2) to be more advantageous to the Spartans.3 But Thucydides only says that the Spartans, considering the first treaty not to be advantageous enough, wanted another one. This does not imply that he thought the second treaty was more advantageous to the Spartans than the first (the second treaty is, I believe, actually more advantageous to the Spartans, but that is not my point). Heitsch builds on this premise the view (inter alia) that 8.37 may be due to the posthumous editor of book eight. He holds (p. 91-92 n. 101, cf. 95-96) the same view on the third treaty, 8.58, with which, he argues, neither 8.57 nor 8.59 tally. He helpfully stresses that this treaty does not explicitly say the fleet will come, but does it follow from this being only implied that 8.58 doesn't tally with 8.57 and 8.59 ? Heitsch's views on 8.37 and 8.58 are to be found (differently and forcibly but, I believe, hardly more successfully argued) in Schwartz 1919, p. 72-75, which neither Heitsch nor Hornblower 2008 mention.

I venture to doubt Heitsch's postulate of Thucydides' awareness (p. 64) : even if one could consider book eight as an opus limatum, one could not expect of any ancient historian, even Thucydides, what is expected of modern historians. His standards of political and strategical thinking were or may have been as different from ours as his standards of accuracy. Furthermore Heitsch seems to be inconsistent, for he himself more than once notes or hints that Thucydides' analysis may be insufficient. Thus, like Andrewes 1981 (p. 95, attributing the idea to D. Lewis, who retracted it), he thinks (pp. 74 ff) that Alcibiades was never threatened with death by the Peloponnesians, contrary to what Thucydides explicitly says (8.45.1). Heitsch thinks this threat is Alcibiades' invention and he quite ingeniously speculates on his strategy. But if Thucydides was so easily misled by Alcibiades or his circle, what are we to think of his critical faculty, and how can we be sure he was aware that the second Spartan-Persian treaty was (if it was) less advantageous to the Spartans than the first ? Another case (if one follows Heitsch's analysis) is the well-known chapter (8.87) in which Thucydides exposes various explanations, including his own, of why Tissaphernes did not bring the Phoenician fleet to the Peloponnesians. Heitsch (p. 95) accepts the view originally broached in Lewis 1958 that the fleet was kept in store for an upheaval in Egypt. He then proceeds to explain why Tissaphernes did not tell the real reason for not bringing the fleet (the satrap, Heitsch suggests, did not want to display the weakness of the kingdom). After Herbse 1989 (here not quoted by Heitsch), Hornblower 2008, p. 1004-1005, effectively challenges Lewis' hypothesis and thinks one has to conclude that Thucydides' view is both pondered and correct. Should we go further than Thucydides himself and hold him to be right when he himself is not sure ? It might be no bad thing if modern scholars gave more thought to their notion of Thucydides' reliability and excellence as an historian and to the way they use it to corroborate their own views on what he does, would or should have said.

Other challenging, if speculative, discussions (outside those pertaining to Alcibiades) are, for instance, p. 80-82, on how Thucydides' judgement in 8.46.5, which tallies with the complaint he attributes to the Peloponnesian soldiers at Miletus (8.78), may have been influenced by a source favourable to Alcibiades or Alcibiades himself ; p. 103-108 on 8.65-66 as being "der angemessene Ersatz für das, was der Leser hier eigentlich erwartet" and one of the many signs that book eight is unfinished ; p. 141 on Thucydides' failure to state what the Four Hundred's embassies were empowered to grant to the Spartans ; p. 152-154 on Theramenes' future attitude to Antiphon and what Thucydides would have said about it (a characteristically speculative but entertaining piece of writing). However stimulating Heitsch's discussions may be, they raise methodological issues. He says in the foreword that he is not primarily interested in the question of the extent to which book eight is unfinished (contrast p. 148 n. 186, "dass das 8. Buch nicht überall jene Form hat, in der Thukydides selbst es hätte veröffentlichen wollen, davon bin ich mit Andrewes und anderen überzeugt" ; p. 132 n. 150 ; p. 172 n. 221), but this question proves essential to many of his discussions. His attitude towards this problem does not seem to me consistent, for he occasionally (p. V-VI, 173) considers facts which he might have attributed to the book's unfinished state as due to other factors, e. g. Thucydides' strategy towards his reader or his unavoidable failure to "impose upon events a logical pattern which they did not possess" (Adcock 1963, quoted p. VI), a failure which is supposed to account for the dullness of 7-44. This case illustrates a recurrent problem in the understanding and interpretation of book eight, since the same facts may be viewed quite differently according as one considers the book partly a posthumous editor's juxtaposition of more or less finished passages (for such a case, see Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica book eight with the notes of my edition) or as an in fieri whole entirely operated by the author himself (I do not imply that these alternative views are always mutually exclusive). Another methodological issue, already pointed to above, is what the word history means when one asks such a question as "welche Möglichkeiten hätte die Geschichte noch bereit gehalten, wenn beide, die Oligarchen in Athen und Alkibiades als Stratege der Flotte auf Samos, in wohlverstandenem Interesse Athens auf dem Boden einer Realpolitik rechtzeitig zueinander gefunden hätten ?" (p. 141-142). Heitsch often speaks of the part played by chance and opportunity, especially missed opportunities, in history. This seems to be one of the keys of Heitsch's book, as one is aware when one reaches its very end and conclusion : "Was man von der Minute ausgeschlagen, gibt keine Ewigkeit zurück" (p. 174, see also p. 107). These words illustrate a personal aspect of the book written by a veteran scholar (born 1928), whose attitude to history seems to be somewhat disenchanted and pessimistic. This feeling, which Heitsch thinks was also Thucydides', may well have influenced the way the former views the part played by individuals in history and especially Alcibiades' part.4

The reader who expects a thorough study of the part played by individuals in history as far as book eight is concerned will be disappointed, though Heitsch has something to say about Agis, Antiphon, Theramenes, Tissaphernes and a lot about Alcibiades, which is dispersed and might better have been gathered in a monograph or paper on this much discussed personality (Heitsch's references to the literature on the subject are too few). The following passages illustrate his attitude to this fascinating but controversial man : "so einfach wie genial" (p. 79, about Alcibiades' argumentation, such as stated in 8.46 ; "genial" p. 169 about the man himself), "der wechselnden Interessenlage des ungewöhnlichen Mannes" (p. 76 n. 76), "gibt Thukydides ein ungeschminktes Bild von der egozentrischen Haltung dieses aussergewöhnlichen Mannes" (p. 127), "egozentrisch" (p. 169, about the man himself). Alcibiades is one "den sein Ingenium aber auch befähigte, Situationen realistisch einzuschätzen, Konzeptionen zu entwickeln, entschlossen zu handeln und gegebenenfalls auch sein eigenes Leben mutig einzusetzen" (p. 173). But history was not favourable to what may seem to be in Heitsch's somewhat romantic view a kind of unfortunate great man. It is (almost unavoidably) not always clear what in Heitsch's portraiture of Alcibiades belongs to reality, what to Thucydides and his informants, what to Heitsch himself. He may well show a bias towards Alcibiades when he challenges (p. 135) Thucydides' view (8.88) that, when he promised the Athenians at Samos to spare no effort to avoid Tissaphernes' bringing the Phoenician fleet to the Peloponnesians, Alcibiades had known ὡς εἰκός for some time (ἐκ πλέονος, "seit längerem" Heitsch) Tissaphernes' intention not to bring the fleet. Thucydides' view is in keeping with 8.46.1, where Alcibiades is said to advise Tissaphernes to maintain a kind of balance between the two sides through not bringing the fleet and other resources to the Peloponnesians. Thucydides' view in 8.88 is very logical if one remembers 8.46.1, so that I am inclined to take ὡς εἰκός (on which Heitsch doesn't comment) as meaning as was natural (so Westlake 1969), as is logical, almost as expected, rather than as was probable (so Andrewes 1981, p. 293, 456 ; Hornblower 2008, p. 1007, comparing 8.46.5, but there we have at least as far as can be conjectured from his actions and the passage is about Tissaphernes, which makes no small difference, for Thucydides could be informed of Alcibiades' thoughts more easily than of Tissaphernes'). On the other hand one could argue that, if 8.46.1 and 8.88 belong to different strata of composition, we are not entitled to interpret the latter in the light of the former. Certainly, Alcibiades emerges as a much more cynical figure if we follow Thucydides in 8.88, but we should resist idealization. If we do, we may be more prepared to understand why history, to speak like Heitsch, was not there when the unreliable and cynical man knocked at the door and we may avoid exaggerating the responsibility of chance, history or those who were not able to seize the opportunity Alcibiades supposedly might have offered them.

The translations from the Greek are accurate, except seemingly in 8.58.6 (p. 92), where textual criticism and accuracy in translation have a bearing on historical analysis (see Hornblower 2008, p. 930-931) : ἐφ' ἑαυτοῖς (the transmitted and commonly accepted text, which I suppose Heitsch translates) cannot mean auf eigene Kosten. Weil 1972 conjectures ἀφ' ἑαυτῶν, which he translates "à leurs propres frais", but, unless I am mistaken, ἐφ' ἑαυτῶν would be better Thucydidean Greek (cf. 8.8.1, translated "par leurs propres moyens" by Weil himself !, and 8.63.4). Heitsch, who refers his reader to no edition, rarely quotes and more rarely discusses the Greek ; where he does (p. 42 n. 39 ; p. 83 n. 87 ; p. 85 n. 92 ; p. 107 n. 110 ; p. 121 n. 138), his notes are far from being always satisfactory. The confusing note on p. 42 about 8.23.5 is (I believe) both wildly speculative and wide off the mark : "die Unsicherheit des Textes könnte irgendwie mit der Tatsache zusammenhängen, dass Thukydides hier nicht voll informiert ist und -- vermutlich -- eine endgültige Darstellung auf später verschob". On p. 146 n. 183 Heitsch notes that Thucydides in 8.96.5 summarizes what he says at greater length in 1.70, but, if one carefully examines the structure of the sentence in 8.96.5, it appears problematic enough for one to consider Krüger 1861's view that part of it is interpolated. Of course one may argue that the problematic construction betrays the unfinished state of book eight. On p. 157 Heitsch speaks of Mindaros' 86 ships (8.103.1) and, after others, rightly remarks that they should be 87 : "73 + 16 - 2 (die nach 103,2 bei der Verfolgung verloren gingen)". There would be no problem if 3 instead of 2 were read in 8.103.2. Now 3 is the number indicated by Diodorus 13.39.1, whose testimony is generally discarded because "it would be unwise to take this as based on different and better evidence than that available to Thucydides" (Hornblower 2008, p. 1047, referring to Busolt ; 88 is a mistake for 86 in Hornblower's note). But does the transmitted text offer us the evidence available to Thucydides ? I am not sure it is wise to discard Diodorus' testimony here and/or the change of 2 into 3 proposed by Stahl 1883, who suggests, as a less plausible alternative, that the ship may have disappeared in the tempest mentioned in 8.99. In his foreword Heitsch might have warned his reader of the textual uncertainties with which book eight teems.

Those who are not scholars may read Heitsch's book with enjoyment or profit. Specialists might miss a more scholarly approach than the descriptive analysis or explanatory paraphrasis offered by the author. His approach raises other issues, mentioned above. However this book can be commended to scholars for the stimulating remarks and discussions embedded in the paraphrasis. One constantly feels its author is conversant with Thucydides' work, manner and thought. The personal aspect of the book, which in a way expresses the disenchanted view of a veteran scholar on history (with a few hints at contemporary history, p. 82 5, p. 105 ; p. 112 n. 117), commands respect. There is a short bibliography and an index personarum. The book is not free from misprints, but they are harmless.

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) publishes timely reviews of current scholarly work in the field of classical studies (including archaeology). The authoritative archive can be found at http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu.

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